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A few yards from his brewhouse at Blue Mountain Brewery in Afton, Virginia, Taylor Smack, owner and brewmaster, shows me his little field of dreams. One year ago, on a quarter-acre plot, Smack planted 200 hop vines, climbing plants that produce the flowers that are used to make beer. Today he admits that his yield wasn’t quite what he’d hoped for. He didn’t water the plants enough, he says, and he used the wrong fertilizer. Standing between thin rows of his plants, Smack reaches up and picks off a bud. “These are kind of pathetic looking compared with a German hops yard, where they grow thick and bushy and 30 feet high. But we’re trying,” he says. “We don’t claim to be farmers.”

Eco-conscious foodies already know the “buy local” mantra, and for good reason: reduce the miles a product travels from farm to table and you typically reduce its carbon footprint. But for many, including Smack, buying local is about something more. It’s about establishing a sense of place, knowing where your food comes from, and supporting your own community. Smack is trying to apply these principles to his beer. And so despite his obvious shortcomings as a farmer, Smack continues to tend his fields, because he can’t get locally grown hops unless he goes out and grows them himself. I’m rooting for him, because I love a good beer — and I love the environment. What I’m searching for, in other words, is a cold, frothy brew that’s carbon lite.

A beer made with local ingredients is hard to find. Just three companies — Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and Miller — account for 80 percent of the entire U.S. beer market. Pick up a bottle of your favorite brand and you’re not likely to find the list of ingredients; beer makers consider their recipes trade secrets.

“What’s in a Bud? What’s in a Coors? There’s, like, 47 different things in there. That’s not cool,” Smack says.

Chemical substances commonly used by commercial brewhouses can be found on the Web site of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. There’s propylene glycol alginate, a chemically modified derivative of algae that keeps a beer’s foamy head standing tall (it’s also used to thicken acidic foods like salad dressing). Keep reading down the list and you realize that stabilizing beer foam must be pretty important, since companies also use several other chemicals to do the job, including gum arabic (which is used in some types of candy to prevent the formation of large sugar crystals) and sodium carboxymethyl-cellulose (another thickening agent used in ice cream, pie filling, and icing). This stuff won’t kill you, but you don’t need any of it to make beer. “There are only four ingredients in all of my beers,” Smack boasts. “Water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. Occasionally a little bit of malted wheat.”

As a craft brewer, Smack is one of a growing number of small-scale producers — better-known craft breweries include Brooklyn, New Belgium, Sam Adams, and Sierra Nevada — who aim to return traditional methods and flavors to the industry. These brands now make up just 5.9 percent of the U.S. beer retail market, although their sales increased by 16 percent in 2007. They all keep their list of ingredients to a bare minimum and avoid chemical additives.

Still, even if you’re drinking one of these brews near where it was produced, chances are it’s not really as local as you think. A closer look at the ingredients explains why. Malted barley provides the sugars that are fermented into alcohol; it’s a beer’s backbone. Yeast gives beer its carbonation, and hops balance the sweetness of barley by imparting a slightly bitter taste. Depending on the variety used, hops impart different flavors and aromas too. After water, barley is the largest ingredient by volume. Yeast and hops are used in far smaller quantities.

According to Smack, yeast is the easy part. “I buy it from a laboratory in a vial, and then I propagate it myself,” he says. “It costs 50 bucks, they FedEx it to me, and then I use it over and over.” He even shares his yeast with three or four other craft brewers in his area and picks up different strains from them when he wants to try something new. “We all share,” he says.

At Blue Mountain, Smack brewed 27,900 gallons of beer using 50,000 pounds of barley last year. The amount of hops he uses in his beer varies, but one of his “hoppier” beers, the Full Nelson Pale Ale, uses less than an ounce of hops per gallon. Some of his other brews require merely one-fifth of that.

Unfortunately, both hops and barley are global commodities, sold to brewers around the world through brokers. Germany, France, Belgium, Australia, and New Zealand are major hops producers, and in the United States, the Pacific Northwest is home to the vast majority of domestic hops farms. Though there is a smattering of small hops farms on the East Coast, they can meet only a fraction of the demand from eastern brewers. For Smack, who wants to brew a truly local beer, a New York-based hops farm is far too distant from Virginia, which explains why he’s started growing his own. After all, he doesn’t need all that much. He projects that he’ll soon meet 30 percent of his hops needs on the small quarter-acre plot he’s currently cultivating.

Of course, he can’t meet his barley needs on his four-acre property. Most of the barley that is used to make beer in the United States is grown in Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota, or in Canada, which leaves most everyone who doesn’t live in northern tier states without a local supply. “Nearest malted barley’s in Wisconsin,” Smack says, and so he buys it from there.

It’s disappointing to think that when I drink a pint of Brooklyn Lager in Brooklyn, New York, or a glass of Sam Adams in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I’m inevitably quaffing hops and barley grown, processed, and shipped to the breweries from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. It wasn’t that way for the real Samuel Adams, who actually was a brewer as well as a patriot. In the 1800s, before production moved west, hops were primarily grown in New York, Vermont, and Virginia, as well as in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and other eastern states. The East Coast may yet return to its former hops-growing glory, but it has a long way to go. The Northeast Hops Alliance lists just two hops farms in the region, both of which are in New York State. In 2004, Ithaca Beer became the first New York-based company in more than 50 years to brew a beer using only hops grown in-state, at Pedersen Farms in Seneca Castle. Victory Brewing of Downington, Pennsylvania, also brews its Harvest Ale using Pedersen Farms hops.

But if you want a pint of Blue Mountain, you have to come to Smack’s brewhouse or live nearby. Blue Mountain lagers and ales are distributed regionally, and that’s the point when it comes to drinking sustainably.

“We’re not going outside our local area,” Smack says. “We get calls from distributors outside Virginia, but that’s not our thing. This is what you should drink when you’re here. We’re lessening our impact on the planet by not having our beer trucked all over the place.”

Even so, Smack can’t produce a truly local beer until he finds a reliable local source of hops and barley, and that’s not happening anytime soon. He mentions some scientists at Virginia Tech who have developed a new strain of barley; right now, they’re growing some on a 24-acre test farm outside Richmond, but it’s not yet commercially available. And one of Smack’s regular patrons recently planted his own field of hops nearby. If it works out, Smack says he’ll buy from him. “But it’s going to take some serious farmers to get into the industry,” he says. “I’m not one. Most of the people who talk to me aren’t ones either.”

Toward the end of my visit, Smack walks me out the back door of the brewery to show me the irrigation system he’s set up: he’s recycling the wastewater from his brewery and using it to water his hop vines. We’re standing about 50 yards from the clapboard house where he lives with his wife and 5-month-old son, the Blue Ridge Mountains looming on the horizon. Life here is pretty good. Business is pretty good. Smack has a lot of loyal patrons, and he’s even opened a restaurant in his brewhouse that will soon feature beef and lamb raised on a nearby farm and fed with Blue Mountain Brewery’s leftover barley. But what about my quest for the perfect carbon-lite brew?

“I guess if you were in the grain belt, you could maybe make a truly local beer,” he says. The problem is, he adds, “just being a brewer is a full time job.”

Source: Originally published in On Earth, December 1, 2008.